Great Maria Read Online Free PDF Page B

guess: ruthlessly he served them meals she could barely stomach, until finally one day at dinner she took a bite of beef and left the hall, ran down to the ward and was sick.
    The cook was shouting in the kitchen across the way. Adela called her from the stairs; Maria answered that she was well. She wiped her mouth on her arm and tramped off across the ward. The cook’s voice drew her down into the kitchen.
    He was beating a scullion over the head with his wooden spoon. She stood to one side, hot with anger. The cook let the scullion go.
    “Well? What do you want?”
    “Why did you even cook that meat?” she cried. “That beef is so sweet I can’t eat it.”
    The cook rammed his spoon under the sash of his apron. “That isn’t my fault. I cook what you give me out of that storeroom. If you’d let me have the key—”
    “My father is very angry about it,” she said.
    “If your mother were alive—”
    “Even Richard is complaining.”
    The cook’s mouth shut, his lower lip jutting like a ledge. She stared at him; her heart thumped. He turned away from her.
    “Well, what should I do—throw it all out?”
    “Whatever you want.” She wondered what else he could do with it. Feed it to the dogs. Sell it in the village. “Just don’t serve it to us.” She started toward the door. A scullion came in and the cook set on him with a roar. She went across the ward again to the New Tower. It was cold and she ran up the stairs toward the heat of the hall.
    Even out on the stairs, she heard Roger shout. She dashed up to the hall. In the middle of the room, between the two tables, he and another knight stood yelling face to face. Just as she came in, the other knight hit Roger in the mouth.
    Roger yelled. He jumped on the other knight and knocked him down and they rolled on the floor, fighting. Richard grabbed his brother and her father grabbed the other knight and they dragged them apart, up onto their feet.
    Over Richard’s shoulder, Roger cried, “Odo, I’ll kill you—”
    “You can try,” Odo shouted.
    His arms around his brother, Richard shoved him back almost to the wall. Her father and another knight held Odo. The rest of the men watched keenly, enjoying it.
    “No fights,” her father called. “We are all Christians here—get your hands together like friends.”
    Roger and Odo glared at each other. Maria stood in the doorway, just behind Roger; she heard him say softly, “I’ll kill him.”
    “Hide it,” Richard whispered.
    Her father cuffed Odo in the head. “Accept each other or you both leave.”
    Roger’s mouth was bloody. He went sullenly forward. Odo met him in the middle of the room and they clasped their hands in a short limp handshake. The other knights cheered.
    Maria went around the room to her place at the table. Her father sat down beside her. “Where did you go? You missed a good fight.”
    “I went to talk to the cook about the meat,” she said. Richard climbed over the bench on her right.
    “What’s wrong with the meat?” her father asked. He reached with both hands for the beef bone in front of him. Chewing, he swung his head toward her, but his eyes went like daggers beyond her, toward Richard.
    Maria looked down at her plate. Her appetite was gone. She sat between the two men, none of them speaking, until they had finished their meal. With the other women, she cleared off the tables. The knights wandered out to their afternoon doings; Richard disappeared. Now that all the food was taken away, Maria was perversely hungry again and she went with Adela to the kitchen for something to eat.
    When she came back up the stairs to the hall, her father and Odo were standing at the end of the room, in the middle of her woman’s gear, deep in talk. No one saw her in the doorway. She turned and slid through the narrow crevice between the stairs and the wall, into the passageway.
    It was black as a mine, except where the peepholes let in threads of light from the hall, but she knew